Ad Copy Character Limits: Google, Meta & LinkedIn

Why character limits matter more than they seem

It's easy to treat character limits as a minor formatting detail, something you'll deal with if the platform complains. In practice, they decide whether your ad reads as finished or as an unfinished sentence someone forgot to trim.

An ad that gets truncated mid-thought looks unfinished even to someone who doesn't know it was cut off. Worse, if the actual offer, the number, the deadline, or the call-to-action sits in the part that gets chopped, the reader never sees the reason to click at all. The ad still runs. It still spends budget. It just stops working.

The frustrating part is that most platforms don't warn you clearly while you're typing. Some hard-stop you the moment you go over. Others let you type as much as you want and quietly truncate it later, in the feed, where you're no longer watching. You find out something was cut off only after checking how the ad actually looks live, which most people don't do until performance already looks off.

This matters more now than it used to. Ad platforms have quietly shrunk the amount of guaranteed visible space over the past few years, packing more content, more social proof, and more competing ads into the same scroll. A headline that would have shown in full three years ago might get squeezed today. Writers who learned their platform's limits a while back are often working from numbers that have since changed.

There's also a compounding cost. If you're running the same core message across Google Search, Meta, and LinkedIn at once, a single piece of copy rarely fits all three without adjustment. Writing one version and pasting it everywhere is the fastest way to have it look complete on one platform and get chopped in half on another.

The limits, platform by platform

These are the actual numbers, not rounded approximations. Some are hard limits the platform enforces before you can save an ad. Others are soft, recommended limits where the platform lets you type more but truncates the display.

Google's numbers are hard limits enforced by the ad builder itself. Meta and LinkedIn's numbers are the point where truncation starts in the most common placements; the platforms let you type more, but you shouldn't count on the extra length ever being seen.

A few details worth knowing about how these numbers get used in practice:

• Google's 15 headlines aren't all shown at once. The system rotates and tests combinations of your headlines and descriptions, so each one needs to work as a standalone 30-character line, not as part of a fixed sequence you control.
• Meta's 40-character headline sits below the primary text on most feed placements, and it's often the only line visible without expanding, so it carries more weight than its short length suggests.
• LinkedIn's 70-character headline is the conservative number. Some placements show closer to 200 characters, but since you can't control which placement a given impression lands on, 70 is the length that's safe everywhere.

What actually happens when you go over

The three platforms handle overflow very differently, and knowing which behavior you're dealing with changes how carefully you need to count.

• Google simply won't let you save it. Type past 30 characters in a headline field or 90 in a description, and the field goes red with a negative character count. You cannot publish the ad until you cut it down. This is annoying in the moment but honest: you always know exactly where you stand.
• Meta lets you keep typing, then truncates quietly. Your primary text can run to hundreds of characters in the ad editor, and it will look complete there. In the actual feed, anything past roughly 125 characters collapses behind a "See more" link. Most people never click "See more." If your offer, discount, or CTA lives after that point, most of your audience never sees it.
• LinkedIn does the same thing with introductory text. You can write a full paragraph, and LinkedIn will accept it. On the feed, only the first ~150 characters show before it's cut off with a "…see more" prompt, and B2B audiences scrolling LinkedIn on mobile are even less likely to expand it.

A hard limit tells you immediately that something's wrong. A soft limit lets the mistake ship, and you only find out when the click-through rate doesn't match the quality of the offer.

There's a second, quieter cost to going over on a soft limit. Even when someone does tap "See more," they've already made a small extra decision to keep reading. Every extra tap between someone seeing your ad and understanding your offer loses you a share of the audience, and it's a step you don't need to force on them if the copy fits in the first place.

Writing tight copy that still lands

The fix isn't writing shorter for the sake of it. It's making sure the part that always shows carries the whole argument.

• Front-load the hook. Put the benefit, the number, or the reason to care in the first 5-7 words. That's the part visible even when everything after it gets truncated, so it has to do the heavy lifting on its own.
• Put the call-to-action early when you can. If "Get 20% off today" only shows up at character 140, it might as well not exist for a chunk of your audience. Say it as close to the front as the copy allows.
• Treat the character count as a filter, not a punishment. A 30-character headline forces you to cut every word that isn't doing work. That's usually copy that reads better anyway, not just shorter copy.
• Write the short version first. It's much easier to expand a tight, clear line than to shrink a long one without losing the point. Start at the limit and only add back what earns its place.

One more thing worth remembering: platforms don't count characters the way you'd expect when emojis, symbols, or non-English characters are involved. A single emoji can silently eat two, three, or more characters out of your limit. If you're right at the edge, that's usually the first thing to cut.

It also helps to read your draft out loud and stop at the exact character count where truncation would hit. If the sentence still makes sense and still sells the offer at that stopping point, you're safe even if the reader never sees the rest. If it turns into a dangling clause, that's the sign the important part is on the wrong side of the cutoff, and it needs to move earlier rather than get trimmed further.

Checking your copy before you launch

Counting characters by hand in a text editor works, technically, but it's slow and easy to get wrong once you're juggling headlines, descriptions, and primary text across three platforms at once.

We built a free Ad Copy Character Counter for exactly this. Paste in your headline, description, or primary text, and it shows a live count against each platform's exact limit as you type, so you see the moment you cross into truncation territory instead of finding out after the ad is already live. It covers Google, Meta, and LinkedIn's limits side by side, so you can check the same line of copy against all three before you commit to one version.

Running the copy through a counter before launch takes under a minute and catches the exact mistake this whole post is about: a great line that never gets seen because it was seven characters too long.